Kate Tempest, performance poet (video)

Kate Tempest has just won Britain's Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry. At 27, this performance poet is the youngest person to win it. Kate's extraordinary lyricism and passionate performances have been shared through the Royal Shakespeare Company, which commissioned work from her, and the Battersea Arts Centre, which has been presenting her award-winning 'Brand New Ancients'. Kate, a proud South Londoner, is here for the Sydney Writers' Festival. This live, filmed segment with Phillip Adams in the Radio National Sydney studio will include some performance.

Comments (7)

Symon :

Gatlinburg :

21 May 2013 8:49:56pm

Agree 100%. I switched off after a few minutes of Krauss, and was glad when I caught the second half of the Icarus poem, and the rest of the interview. The difference was that Krauss had an agenda, and Kate was speaking from the heart.

Bob Shannon :

Geof Nanto :

23 May 2013 8:41:44am

The ecology of our mythopoeic landscape has been as profoundly altered and destroyed as the physical landscape of our planet. I admire Kate Tempest because she has her roots in the remnant old growth forests of our human psyche. She seeks to grow new meaning from the rich earth of our mythological heritage. She embodies the hero myth and perhaps her Icarus poem prefigures the fate of her quest. And like the Icarus of her poem it is not her ultimate success or failure that counts but rather her lived emotional / spiritual experience.

Geof :

25 May 2013 10:01:44am

I've watched some of the videos on Kate’s website. She is an impressive performer. I love the expression on her face when she goes into that ‘safe place’ she described to Phillip when she's reciting. Her poems are primarily exaltations for us to be heroes in our own lives – to find the heroic in the everyday. We’re all enchanted by the hero archetype, it’s the pathway of dignity in human agency. Yet today it’s degenerated into the insipid double negative “Don’t be a victim.”

In the Jungian framework there are three types of hero. We are mixtures of all three in various proportions - one type no more valid than another. Briefly, they are as follows:-

The aim of the extraverted type of hero is action - he / she is the founder, leader, and liberator whose deeds change the face of the world. The introverted type is the culture bringer, the redeemer and saviour who discovers inner values, exalting them as knowledge and wisdom, as a law and faith, a work to be accomplished and an example to be followed. The third type of hero does not seek to change the world through his / her struggles with outside or inside, but to transform the personality. Self-transformation is his / her true aim, and the liberating effect this has on the world is only secondary.

Deb :

Kate - So brilliant inspiring and enlightened.She is inspiring a whole generation - words cannot express somethings- its her soul that does the talking and she is a wondrous being.

Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia and felt perfectly entitled. Kate is ways brazenly moving young women out of the sacrificial context where patriarchy has dumped us for thousands of years. Kate speaks for freedom of the feminine and unleashing the power of truth.